In a private art collection somewhere resides a quiet little
oil painting on canvas of two wilting yellow roses in a drinking glass.It measures just 10 by 11 ½ inches.And it is one of the world’s greatest
paintings.

In its apparent simplicity, this little work contains all
the deep secrets of the unfathomable art of oil painting and loyally refuses to
yield them to those who seek the same perfection in their own work. Don’t ask me to explain why this is so.I can’t. And I’m certain the painter couldn’t have either.

The creator of this masterpiece was the iconic Finnish
painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946), whose rise to fame in her later years and
after her death was no doubt aided by a life filled with “illness, loneliness,
pain and suffering,” as summarized by one chronicler, a surefire recipe for
public adoration of a gifted artist.This
shy, introverted painter left behind about 1,000 paintings and 2,000 letters,
so there is a lot of material for scholars to ponder over.

An art critic for The
Independent of London, in a
review of a big Schjerfbeck exhibit in The Hague,
Hamburg and Paris
in 2007, wrote, “Imagine the life of Frida Kahlo yoked to the eye of Edvard
Munch, and you’ll begin to get the measure of this oeuvre.”Kahlo endured a similar life of physical
pain, but she confronted and publicly glorified her infirmities in her
artwork.Schjerfbeck on the other hand, became
reclusive and introverted, spending most of her life isolated in small towns in
Finland and Sweden.

Schjerfbeck wrote to a friend in 1917 that she hadn’t known
one day of good health in 50 years. “One
gets so tired of fighting,” she wrote.She somehow managed to complete all those paintings,
despite sometimes being able to paint only one or two hours a day.Her self-described lifelong illnesses are not
identified in any of the online articles I read.

Here’s a brief rundown on some of the troubles she suffered early
on that may have contributed to her shy and reclusive personality.When she was four years old, she fell on a
staircase, breaking her left hip and leaving her with a permanent limp.Her twin siblings (a brother and sister), died
at the age of one, her elder sister died shortly before her birth, and when she
was 13 she lost her father to tuberculosis, causing her mother to take on
boarders for a time to make ends meet. A
brother, Magnus, survived and grew up to be an architect.Because of her poor health she was home-schooled
in early childhood.She was “silent and
gloomy.” As an adult, Schjerfbeck spent many
years caring for her ill mother, a frequent model for her paintings, who died
in 1923.

Considered a child prodigy for her drawing skill at a very
young age, Schjerfbeck was admitted to the Finnish
Art Society Drawing
School when she was only 11 years
old.In 1880, when she was 18, she went
off to Paris to study in the
academies, with Léon Bonnat and Gustave Courtois, among others. During the 1880s, she spent time
painting at various art colonies, including Concarneau and Pont-Aven in Brittany,
and St. Ives in Cornwall. Her work in that decade is very much influenced
by the plein-air naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage and others, including
Stanhope Forbes.And that’s the work of
hers that I really love.

In 1884 she had
her own studio in Paris, which she
longed for again in her final years, and she lamented losing her drawing
ability as she settled into her expressionistic, modernist phase by 1905, which she
pursued for the remainder of her life. In a 1914 letter to a friend, she complained that "I don't know how to draw anymore." Her later figurative work is marked by simplified
abstractions of line, light and color.

Schjerfbeck had moved back to Finland
around 1890, due to her declining health, and began teaching regularly at the Art
Society drawing school. But in 1902, she became too ill to teach and resigned
her position.She kept in touch with the
European art scene through black-and-white reproductions in art magazines and
books, which artist friends sent her, leading to her experimentation with line,
color and abstract shapes from magazine illustrations. When no models were
available, she would use photographic portraits as a source of inspiration for
her modernist works.It is noted that
living with her mother in a predominately female community gave Schjerfbeck the
artistic freedom she desired.She once
mentioned that Degas, also, could only settle down to paint by disdaining
society.

In 1913, Schjerfbeck met the art dealer Gösta Stenman, who
arranged numerous exhibits of her work and began paying her a monthly salary in
1938. She continued to paint actively,
even during her last years.During her final
two years of life she lived in the Saltsjöbaden spa hotel in Sweden,
where she created her now-famous “final burst” of reductive self-portraits.

Schjerfbeck painted at least 36 self-portraits throughout
her career.These works became increasingly
abstract and analytical, eventually recording her physical deterioration,
ending with ghostlike skull imagery.The
later self-portraits, created during the Second World War are “haunting and
cartoonish,” in one critic’s view.Schjerfbeck is said to be best known today for those self-portraits,
painted from 1878 to 1945. “Now that I so seldom have the strength to paint,
I’ve started on a self-portrait,” she wrote to a friend in 1921. “This way the
model is always available, although it isn’t at all pleasant to see oneself.”

Writing in an online journal of 19th Century art
at the time of the European tour of Schjerfbeck’s work, the Belgian art historian
Marjan Sterckx offered an analysis of the painter’s late modernist philosophy
and technique:She attained an expressive
imagery through the reduction of the narrative and her color palette, by
leaving out more and more detail, and working with fields and two dimensions,
without abandoning depth. Schjerfbeck herself wrote: "A work of art always
lacks the last few details; the finished is dead." In literature, she also saw confirmation of
the principle that "we do not [need to] list every detail; a hint brings
us closer to the truth." So she went
in search of the essence and the power of emptiness through the simplification
and blurring of pictorial elements, and the omission of the unnecessary. Helene
Schjerfbeck tried to express as much as possible with as little as possible.

Her conviction that “the finished is dead” is apparent in
the way she treated her exquisite painting of the two wilting yellow
roses.It is far from finished in the
photographic sense, but it is “finished” to absolute perfection.From her vantage point, she saw clearly and felt intensely what nature had created, and that was that. She seemed incredibly perceptive as to the
right time to stop working on a painting before killing it with narcoleptic “finish,”
even in her most realistic paintings from the 1880s. Whenever you see most painters’ photographic
record of the creation of a painting, the best image is invariably the one
shown one or two stages before the completed work.Try to tell that to all of today’s
photographic finishers!

Riita Konttinen, a Finnish art historian, writes:Schjerfbeck's
own way of working was very slow; she painted and erased her works many times
in order to achieve the effect that she wanted. She was very self-critical and
never felt that she had achieved what she was really aiming at. "One
should paint with feelers, not with brushes and fingers", she once
remarked. But Helene Schjerfbeck was not
so ethereal and incorporeal as people have often fondly imagined, and her work
is not mere aestheticising but an intensive exploration of the depths of
existence, an exploration tied in many ways to general developments in her era
and in art.

Schjerfbeck never married.She had a brief engagement to an unnamed English artist she met in an
art colony in Brittany, but
eliminated any traces of that relationship.Konttinen writes that Schjerfbeck’s
fiancé broke off the engagement because his relatives suspected that her hip
problem was of a tubercular nature.And
she had a long-term unrequited friendship with the lumberjack, writer and
artist Einar Reuter, who wrote the first biography of her in 1917.“They corresponded regularly,” Konttinen
writes, “and Reuter adopted a caring attitude towards her; Schjerfbeck for her
part became deeply attached to him. The news of Reuter's engagement to the
Swede Tyra Arp in 1919 came as a shock to her, as she was afraid of losing this
friendship. But Reuter and Schjerfbeck continued to be close friends.”
Konttinen surmises that having no children seems to have been particularly sad
for Schjerfbeck, who later thought of adopting a child, but her environment was
hostile to that notion.

So that’s my funny valentine to Ms. Schjerfbeck for creating
one of my favorite works of art.And that’s
my Valentine’s Day story for all you lovelorn painters out there.You will just have to face the fact that,
like Schjerfbeck, painting is going to be your only true love.

About Me

I'm a New York City oil painter of still lifes, portraits and figures. Nearly all my paintings are created entirely from life under natural light. I also sketch the figure from life with charcoal pencils on smooth newsprint. I hope that some of my thoughts on painters and painting will be of interest to a few like-minded souls who might stumble upon this blog. If you do, you are cordially invited to check out my online Etsy gallery, where some of my original oil paintings are available for purchase: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RobertHoldenFineArt. In addition, reproductions of my artwork are available for purchase on my Fine Art America website: http://robertholdenart.com/ I'm also on Facebook.